A Fuzzy Vault Scheme for Ordered Biometrics*

Abstract—The fuzzy vault scheme has recently become popular approaches to biometric template protection. Since the original scheme has been designed to work with unordered biometric features, such a scheme cannot effectively utilize order information. We present in this paper a new fuzzy vault scheme that can effectively utilize the ordered characteristics of biometric features. In this scheme, we develop ordered fuzzy vault encoding and decoding processes in order to utilize the ordered information of the features. This prevents the feature components from cross matching and reduces false acceptance ratio (FAR). Furthermore, the original biometric features (or original template) are transformed into binary features (or secure template) by random transformation. The transformed secure template provides both diversity and revocability. This transform also prevents an adversary from obtaining the original biometric template from the secure template and therefore enhance the secure level of the scheme. Based on the proposed scheme, we design an online authentication application framework implemented using face images. We compare our scheme with two contemporary approaches to verify the effectiveness of this approach. Experimental results show that our scheme is able to achieve an improved performance with several desired properties of an online authentication system. Index Terms—Ordered fuzzy vault scheme, Biometric template protection, random transformation I